I came to this book with some trepidation. It
was a book written by no less than four authors who
had taken on the ambitious task of producing a history
of crime and punishment in England pretty much since
England began. I expected a book uneven in style,
lacking a coherent focus (can four authors,
alphabetically ordered, agree on several hundred years
of history?), superficial in the extreme. The book's
style is remarkably uniform, and it does have a focus
(albeit, as we shall see, one that is politically
correct).

Unfortunately, they have been unable to escape
the inescapable: superficiality reigns, especially in
their conclusion sections. Take the conclusion at the
end of the first chapter. Here we are told that "law
created the state," a challenging assertion and a
remarkable oversimplification. What a wonderful
classroom discussion could be had around this small
quote! A tactic the authors might better have adopted
would have been to turn their generalizations offered
in conclusions at the end of each chapter into
questions for students to ponder, especially as some
of their generalizations were quite challenging and to
a degree provocative. That democracy in England took
root in the 1500s (p.99) is a provocative conclusion,
it seems to me.

The authors offer a balanced account of the
history of crime (the Marxist historians aren't
completely right, but neither are the conservatives'
p.150), which is to say that it is politically
correct. Which means, of course, that the balance
isn't quite balanced rather, it comes down on the side
of the predictable, though not truly revealed until
the final pages of the Epilogue, by noting the law's
(that is to say, several hundred years of it)
"consistent bias towards protecting the person and
property of the better off" (p.250). They do not seem
to consider the possibility that the law might also
protect the poor from each other. In fact the
Epilogue is the most revealing chapter of the book.
Here we are told that "crime was and is a way of
making a living or supplementing the resources of
those denied an adequate lifestyle."

It seems that in 1998, the English historians
have discovered opportunity theory. Their view of
crime and society is summed up by the two last
sentences, dripping with sentimental righteousness and
false irony: "as the century draws to an end, the
proportion of the population that can be listed as
neither victims nor perpetrators of crime is dwindling
into insignificance. In the most direct sense
possible, this history ends with us all." Do they
mean that we are all either victims, criminals or
both? So what's new? Their account of the history of
crime and punishment has been an attempt to show that [End page 58]
those most often defined as criminal (the lower class)
aren't really criminals, but are victims. And those
claiming to be victims (the propertied class) are
really the criminals. Their failure to recognize
basic moral distinctions between those who commit
crime and those who don't (they discard them as
"Victorian"), and crime and non-crime certainly does
eliminate any possibility of a history of crime and
punishment. For neither, with their lack of
demarcation, can be discerned from the other.

The book is at its best when describing the
evolution of the English court system, or systems,
especially its care to examine the growth of the
criminal courts in parts other than London. In fact,
the main area in which I learned most was in their
attention to the transition from a London based system
of government to one, which perceived of crime and
punishment as a national concern rather than one of
localized interest. This is an important theme that
runs throughout the book. Different aspects of the
criminal justice system developed their national
identities at different periods of time. Indeed,
crime itself seems not to have developed a national
identity until the bureaucrats (the authors do not use
that term but rather refer to "professionalisation")
gained power at the turn of the 19th century. It is
also to the author's credit that they give
considerable credence to the notion that for the three
centuries prior to the "enlightenment" there were
elaborate and complex systems for tackling crime,
pursuing criminals and for meting out punishment. The
diversity of punishments and justice systems was
remarkable, and certainly could be said to have
"worked" within the ambiance of the times, that is, if
we are able to stand back and see those systems
through the eyes of their contemporaries. (This is my
conclusion, not the authors.)

The book provides a history of punishment in the
19th century that is unexceptional, and pretty much
follows the lines of most histories of that time: the
prison hulks, transition to transportation, and
ultimately the rise of the prison. The authors do not
offer any new or different explanation for the rise of
prison, except to refer approvingly to the works of
Foucault and Ignatieff. The account of patterns of
crime offers some entertaining snippets of criminals
lives, along with a review of what they consider are
crimes worthy of writing a history about: murder,
crimes against property (which they emphasize in many
places account for the overwhelming majority of crime
throughout the ages), domestic violence, white collar
crime which included embezzlement and pyramid schemes
(including even a building society scandal),
drunkenness, gambling, drug abuse, prostitution,
vagrancy, homosexuality, and crimes relating to
motoring, i.e. traffic offences. They also examine
special categories of offenders: the young, women,
professional criminals, and the poor. Here we find a
small lack of balance (though politically correct):
while noting throughout the book, and indeed
throughout history that young males have made up by
far the majority of offenders (four-fifths and more)
they do not attend to this interesting and well
documented fact about crime. Why not isolate "male [End page 59]
offenders" as a special category and offer some
historical insights into why throughout history they
seem to be the main perpetrators of crime? Is there
something about men (and about women) that causes this
imbalance? Has the cultural ethos of England been
such a powerful transmitter of gender roles as to
ensure that it is men who become the criminals in
every epoch? These questions, it is true, may be too
much to address in an introductory book. Yet an
explanation of "why male" would explain about four-
fifths of all crime!

Similarly, the authors are unable to bring
themselves to address the other major factor that
contributes to crime today (and in all likelihood many
prior centuries of crime and punishment): ethnicity.
It is not until their Epilogue that they mention that
the "greatest and most persistent projection of the
deviant tradition has been in the shape of outsider
national and racial minorities" and note that just
over 12% of inmates in English prisons are from
minority groups who comprise only 5% of the total
population. Much of their history of crime and
punishment is preoccupied with "class conflict,"
towing the party line set by Douglas Hay and others.
They are mostly concerned to debunk the idea that the
middle classes had (and possibly still have) of the
lower class as the "dangerous class" which had to be
kept in check in order to maintain the order of their
own social position. The ethnic makeup of the lower
classes is not addressed. The fact that a majority of
criminals transported to Australia were Irish is
surely worthy of more than a couple of lines in the
Epilogue, given the difficult relationship the Irish
have had with the British through out history.

Yet they repeatedly observe that there is a
problem with the class conflict explanation for the
patterning of crime and punishment: it does not
explain why the majority of offenders are youthful and
male. At one point they half-heartedly suggest that
"A better case can be made for arguing that those in
their teens and twenties constituted a crime-prone
generation." One wishes that they had made this case,
particularly as it seems from their own account that
in every epoch of English history, it was the teens
that were the major criminal "class."

Urbanization and industrialization are also
identified as major contributors to crime, although by
their own accounts, crime existed quite well prior to
urbanization and certainly well before
industrialization. Its rapid increase, coinciding
with the industrial revolution, also coincided with
the increased professionalization of criminal justice
and social service personnel, resulting, as they also
note, in a much more systematic and meticulous
recording of statistics of crime. Thus, it is not
easy to separate out the recording effect from the
apparent increase in amounts of crime after the
industrial revolution. This is not to say that they
are wrong, but it is to say that the generalizations
they make are not easy to substantiate.

One small point concerning documentation. For a
history, the book is curiously short on documentation. [End page 60]
In fact, there is no citation system. This is a
serious omission because many of the (necessarily
brash) claims of fact that are made concerning the
amount and extent of crime at particular historical
periods (for example on page 25) are based on studies
that are of necessity incomplete and controversial in
themselves and in their methodologies. The authors do
recognize that records and evidence are incomplete,
but without accurate and complete citations, it is not
possible for the reader to check them out.

All in all, the book reads rather like a set of
lectures, which are at times entertaining, and often
quite informative. The authors have succeeded in
conveying an interesting, and at times captivating
picture of a broad sweep of English history (always
fascinating in itself, which helped them a lot), and
it is certainly adequate as "An Introductory History,"
the subtitle of the book.

Graeme Newman
University at Albany,
State University of New York[End page 61]